I never send auto messages for just this reason. What do you think of them?
I’ve followed a few authors on twitter the other day, and almost every single one sent me an automated message asking me to check their book.
Seriously, I must’ve gotten some ten auto direct messages in a day.
One of them even said, “Sorry for the spam, but if you have a second, could you please check my book?”
I’m sorry, but I’m one to believe that you shouldn’t apologize for spam: Just don’t use it.
So I decided to be a do-gooder and sent a message to said author. He replied claiming it generated TONS of sales to him.
Remember when you were fifteen and your friends mocked you because you were still a virgin, and you said, “I’m totally not, in fact I have seen loads of penises!”
“Oh yeah?” Britney asked. “And what color are they, stupid virgin?”
“Hmm, green?”
Yeah. That was exactly like that.
I…
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Emily Arden, author 
Nice column/reblog. I never use Twitter’s automated messages; I don’t even know how to set them up. Sorry to do this in a reply, but please take a moment to check out my book. It’s good. It really, really is. And it’s never advertised with automated messages!
Another thing I’ve recently decided I can’t stand are people with massive follower lists on Twitter who go on sites like Fiverr.com and say ‘I’ll tweet your book to my list.’ Unless you painstakingly go through that person’s followers, how are you supposed to know you’re going to reach your target audience that way? It might be cheap but it’s still a waste of cash – you’ve most likely created just another twitter message floating in the wind; it will sit nicely with the millions of others ignored on the bird-shaped spam factory. It’s a tactic mostly adopted by desperate authors with low sales. There are better ways of dealing with that problem.
I’ve never liked Twitter anyway. I only have an account because some of my readers like it, and it can be a useful way to communicate one-on-one, but as an advertising tool I’ve always found it useless. I continue to try it for the occasional promo but I’ve yet to see it yield results.
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